Lay Her Among the Lilies vm-2 Page 19

  Kerman picked out the biggest and toughest of them and gave him half a buck.

  “Keep your pals off this car and you’ll get the other half,” he said.

  The boy hauled off and socked a kid around the ears to show his good faith. We left him booting another.

  “Nice neighbourhood,” Kerman said, stroking his moustache with his thumb-nail.

  We went up the steps and examined the two long rows of mail-boxes. Freedlander’s place was on the fifth floor: No. 25. There was no elevator, so we walked.

  “It’s going to make me a happy day if he’s out,” Kerman panted as he paused on the fourth landing to mop his brow.

  “You drink too much,” I said, and began to climb the stairs to the next floor.

  We came to a long, dingy passage. Someone’s radio was playing jazz. It blasted like a hot breath the length and breadth of the passage.

  A slatternly looking woman came out of a room near by. She had on a black straw hat that had seen its best days, and in one hand she clutched a string shopping-bag. She gave us a look full of inquisitive interest, and went on down the passage to the head of the stairs. She turned to stare again, and Kerman put his thumbs to his ears and waggled his fingers at her. She went on down the stairs with her nose in the air.

  We walked along the passage to No. 25. There was no bell or knocker. As I lifted my hand to rap, a muffled bang sounded beyond the door: the sound a paper bag makes when you’ve blown it up and slapped it with your hand.

  I had my gun out and my hand on the door handle before the sound had died away. I turned the handle and pushed. To my surprise the door opened. I looked into a fair-sized room: a living-room if you judged by the way it was furnished.

  I could hear Kerman breathing heavily behind me. I took in the room with a quick glance. There was no one to see. Two doors led off the room, and both were closed.

  “Think it was a gun?” Kerman murmured.

  I nodded, stepped quietly into the room, motioning him to stay where he was. He stayed where he was. I crossed the room and listened outside the right-hand door, but the noise from the blaring radio killed any other sound.

  Waving to Kerman to get out of sight, I turned the handle and set the door moving with a gentle push, and at the same time stepped aside and pressed myself against the wall. We both waited and listened, but nothing happened. Through the open door drifted the strong, acid smell of cordite. I edged forward to peer into the room.

  Slap in the middle of the floor lay a man. His legs were curled up under him, and his hands were clenched into his chest. Blood came through his fingers, ran down his wrists and on to the floor. He was a man around sixty, and I guessed he was Freedlander. As I looked at him, he gave a choking sigh and his hands flopped on the floor.

  I didn’t move. I knew the killer must be in there. He couldn’t have got away.

  Kerman sneaked into the living-room behind me and flattened himself against the other side of the door. His heavy .45 looked like a cannon in his fist.

  “Come on out!” I snarled suddenly. My voice sounded like a buzz-saw cutting into a wood knot. “And with your hands in the air!”

  A gun went off and the slug ploughed through the doorway, close to my head.

  Kerman slid his arm around the door and fired twice. The crash of his gun rattled the windows.

  “You can’t get away!” I said, trying to sound like a tough cop. “We’ve got you surrounded.”

  But this time the killer wasn’t playing. There was silence and no movement. We waited, but nothing happened. I had visions of the cops arriving, and I wasn’t anxious to be involved with the Frisco cops: they were much too efficient.

  I motioned to Kerman to stay where he was and sneaked over to the window. As I pushed it up, Kerman fired into the room again, and, under cover of the noise, I got the window open. I leaned out. A few feet away was the window of the inner room. It meant getting on to the sill, stepping across to die other sill with about a hundred-foot drop below. As I swung my leg out of the window I looked back. Kerman’s eyes were popping and he shook his head at me. I jerked my thumb to the next window, levered myself on to the sill.

  Someone let off a gun from below and the slug splashed cement into my face. I was so startled I nearly let go of my hold, looked down into the street at the up-turned faces of a sizeable crowd. Right in the centre was a beefy-looking cop, taking aim at me.

  I gave a strangled yell, flung myself forward and sideways, lurched against the window of the next room and crashed through the glass to land on all fours on the floor. A gun went off practically in my face, and then Kerman’s cannon boomed, bringing down a chunk of ceiling plaster.

  I flattened out, wriggled desperately to get behind the bed as more shots shook the room.

  I had a sudden vision of a dark, snarling face peering at me over the top of the bed, and a vicious blue nose automatic pointing at my head, then the hand holding the gun disappeared with a crash of gunfire and reappeared again as a spongy, red mess.

  It was my pal the Wop with the dirty shirt. He gave a howl, staggered to the window as Kerman rushed at him. He hit Kerman with the back of his hand, dodged past him and ran out of the door, through the other room and into the passage. More gunfire broke out; a woman screamed: a body thudded to the floor.

  “Watch out!” I gasped. “There’s a gun-happy cop out there. He’ll shoot as soon as look at you.”

  We stood still and waited.

  But the cop wasn’t taking any chances.

  “All out!” he bawled from behind the door. Even from that distance I could hear him breathing. “I’ll blast you to hell if you bring out a rod.”

  “We’re coming,” I said. “Don’t excite yourself, and don’t shoot.”

  We moved out of the room and into the passage with our hands in the air.

  Lying in the passage was the Wop. He had a bullet-hole through the centre of his forehead.

  The cop was one of those massive men, big in the feet and solid bone in the head. He snarled at us, threatening us with his gun.

  “Take it easy, brother,” I said, not liking the look of him. “You have two stiffs on your hands already. You don’t want two more.”

  “I wouldn’t care.” he said, showing his teeth. “Two or four makes no difference to me. Back up against that wall until the wagon arrives.”

  We backed up against the wall. It didn’t take long before we heard the wail of a siren. Two white-coated figures came panting up the stairs, together with a representative group from the Homicide Bureau. I was glad to see Detective District Commander Dunnigan was with them. He and I had done business with each other before.

  “Hello,” he said, and stared at us. “This your funeral?”

  “Very nearly was,” I said. “There’s another stiff inside. Could you tell this officer we’re not dangerous? I keep thinking he’s going to shoot us.”

  Dunnigan waved the copper aside.

  “I’ll be out to talk to you in a moment.”

  He went in to look at Freedlander.

  “He’s a pal of ours,” I told the copper who was glaring at us. “You should be more careful who you shoot at.”

  The copper spat.

  “I was a mug not to have rubbed you two punks out,” he said in disgust. “If they had found me with four stiffs maybe they would have made me a sergeant.”

  “What a charming little mind you have,” Kerman said and backed away.

  III

  We started hack to Orchid City at five o’clock after a couple of awkward hours in Detective District Commander Dunnigan’s office. He had done his best to dig into a case that kept snapping shut every time he thought he had worked the lid off, but he hadn’t succeeded.

  My story was straightforward, and more or less true. I said Freedlander’s daughter had been missing for a couple of years. This he was able to check by calling the Missing People’s Bureau in Orchid City. I told him I had found her wandering the streets suffering from loss of mem
ory, and, having taken her to my secretary’s apartment, had immediately got in my car to come to ‘Frisco to take Freedlander to her.

  He wanted to know how I knew she was Freedlander’s daughter, and I said I read the Missing People’s Bulletin the police circulated and remembered her description.

  He stared bleakly at me for some minutes, wondering whether to believe me or not, and I stared right back at him.

  “Should have thought you had better things to do,” was his final comment.

  I went on to tell him how I had arrived at Freedlander’s apartment, heard a shot, broke in, found Freedlander dead and the Wop trying to get away. I said he fired at us and we fired at him and handed Dunnigan our gun permits. I said maybe the Wop was a burglar. No, I didn’t think I had seen him before, although I might have. All Wops looked alike to me.

  Dunnigan had a sneaking feeling there was much more behind all this than I was telling him. I could see that plainly on his big, square-shaped face. He said so.

  I told him he must have been reading too many detective stories, and could I go now as I had a lot of work to do?

  But he starred in from the beginning again, probing, asking questions, wasting a lot of time, and finally finishing up just where he had started. He looked like a baffled bull as he sat glaring at me.

  Luckily the Wop had taken Freedlander’s money and his gold watch: the only things of value in the apartment, so it was a perfect set-up for a routine shoot-and-run stick-up. Finally, Dunnigan decided to let us go.

  “Maybe it was a stick-up,” he said heavily. “If you two birds hadn’t been in on it, it would have been a stick-up, but you being there makes me wonder.”

  Kerman said if he worried about a little case like this, he would be an old man and retired before he got to the big cases.

  “Never mind,” Dunnigan said sourly. “I don’t know what it is about you guys. Whenever you show your faces in this City, trouble starts, and it usually starts for me. I wish you’d keep out. I’ve got all the work I want without you coming here and making me more.”

  We both laughed politely, shook hands, promised we would attend the inquest and left him.

  We didn’t say a word until we were in the Buick, and driving along Oakland Bay Bridge, heading for home. Then Kerman said gently, “If that guy ever finds out the Wop was the one who kidnapped Stevens, I have a feeling life may he a little difficult for you.”

  “It’s difficult enough as it is. We’re now landed with Anona.” I drove along for a mile or so before saying, “You know, this is a hell of a case. All along I have had the feeling that someone is trying very hard to keep a big, strong cat from getting out of the bag. We’re missing something. We’re looking at the bag, and not at the cat, and the cat is the key to the whole set-up. It has to be. Everyone who has caught sight of it has been silenced: Eudora Drew, John Stevens, Nurse Gurney, and now Freedlander. And I have an idea that Anona Freedlander knows about the cat, too. Somehow we have to get her memory going again: and fast.”

  “If she knows something why didn’t they knock her off instead of keeping her in that home?” Kerman said.

  “That’s what’s worrying me. Up to now all of them have been killed more or less accidentally, but Freedlander was murdered. That means someone is getting in a panic. It also means that Anona is no longer safe.”

  Kerman sat up.

  “You think they’ll try to get at her?”

  “Yeah. We’ll have to hide her some place safe. Maybe we could get Doc Mansell to put her in his Los Angeles clinic and I’ll get Kruger to lend me a couple of his bruisers to sit outside the door.”

  “Maybe you have been reading too many detective stories, too,” Kerman said, looking at me out of the corner of his eyes.

  I kept the Buick moving at high speed while I thought about Freedlander’s killing, and the more I thought the more jittery I got.

  We reached San Lucas, and I pulled up outside a drug store.

  “What now?” Kerman asked, surprised.

  “I’m going to call Paula,” I said. “I should have called her from ‘Frisco. I’ve got the shakes.”

  “Take it easy,” Kerman said, and looked startled. “You’re letting your imagination run

  away with you.”

  “I hope I am,” I said, and made for the phone booth.

  Kerman clutched my arm and pulled me back.

  “Look at that!”

  He was pointing to a stack of evening newspapers on the magazine counter. Inch headlines smeared across the front page read:

  Wife of Well-known Nature Cure Doctor

  Commits Suicide

  “Get it,” I said, jerked my arm free and shut myself in the booth. I put the call through to Paula’s apartment and waited. I could hear the buzz-buzz note of the ringing tone, but no one answered. I stood there, my heart thumping, the receiver against my ear, listening and waiting.

  She should be there. We had agreed Anona wasn’t to be left alone.

  Kerman came to stare at my tense face through the glass door. I shook my head at him, broke the connection and asked the operator to try again.

  While she was making another connection, I opened the door.

  “No answer,” I said. “She’s trying again.”

  Kerman’s face darkened.

  “Let’s get on. We have a good hour’s run yet.”

  “We’ll do it in better time than that,” I said, and, as I was about to hang up, the operator came on and said the line was in order, but there was no answer.

  I rammed down the receiver, and together we ran out of the store. I sent the Buick whipping down the main street, and as soon as we were clear of the town I opened up.

  Kerman was trying to read the newspaper, but, at the speed we were going, he had trouble in holding it steady.

  “She was found this afternoon,” he bawled in my ear. “She took poison after Salzer had

  reported Quell’s death to the police. No word about Anona. Nothing about Nurse Gurney.”

  “She’s the first of them to get cold feet,” I said. “Or else someone fed her poison. To hell with her, anyway. I’m scared about Paula.”

  Kerman said afterwards he had never been driven in a car so fast in his life, and he didn’t ever want to go through the experience again. At one time the speedometer needle was stuck at ninety-two, and kept there as we roared along the wide coast road with, the horn blaring.

  A speed cop came after us, but he couldn’t make the grade. He stuck behind for two or three miles, then dropped out of sight. I guessed he would phone our description through to the next town, so I swung off the main road and went pelting along a dirt road that wasn’t much wider than twenty feet. Kerman just sat with his eyes closed and prayed.

  We arrived in Orchid City fifteen minutes under the hour, and that was driving. We had done the sixty odd miles in forty-five minutes.

  Paula had an apartment on Park Boulevard, a hundred yards or so from Park Hospital. We roared up the broad boulevard and braked outside the apartment block with a squeal of tyres like hog-day in a slaughter-house.

  The elevator seemed to crawl to the third floor. It got there eventually, and we both raced down the passage to Paula’s apartment. I rammed my thumb in the bell-push and leaned my weight on it. I could hear the bell ringing, but no one answered. Sweat was standing out on my face as if I’d just come out of a shower.

  I stood away.

  “Together,” I said to Kerman.

  We lunged at the door with our shoulders. It was a good door, but we were pretty good men. The third lunge snapped the lock and carried us into the neat little hall.

  We had our guns in our fists as we went through the living-room to Paula’s bedroom.

  The bed was in disorder. The sheet and blanket lay on the floor.

  We went into the bathroom and the spare bedroom: the apartment was empty: both Paula and Anona had vanished.

  I rushed to the telephone and got though to the office. Trixy said Paula ha
dn’t called. She said a man who wouldn’t give his name had telephoned twice. I told her to give him Paula’s number if he phoned again and hung up.

  Kerman gave me a cigarette with a hand that shook slightly. I lit it without being conscious of what I was doing and sat on the bed.

  “We’d better get out to the Dream Ship,” Kerman said in a tight, hard voice. “And get out there quick.”

  I shook my head.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “What the hell!” Kerman exploded, and started for the door. “They’ve got Paula. Okay, we go out there and talk to them. Come on!”

  “Take it easy,” I said, not moving. “Sit down and don’t be obvious.”

  Kerman came up to me.

  “You crazy or something?”

  “Do you think you’d ever get near that ship in daylight?” I said, looking at him. “Use your head. We’re going out there, but we’ll go when it’s dark.”

  Kerman made an angry gesture.

  “I’m going now. If we wait it may be too late.”

  “Oh, shut up!” I said. “Get a drink. You’re staying right here.”

  He hesitated, then went into the kitchen. After a while he came back with a bottle of Scotch, two glasses and a jug of ice-water. He made drinks, gave me one and sat down.

  “There’s not a damn thing we can do if they’ve decided to knock her on the head,” I said.

  “Even if they haven’t done it now, they’d do it the moment they saw us coming. We’ll go out there when it’s dark, and not before.”

  Kerman didn’t say anything. He sat down, took a long pull at his drink and squeezed his hands together.

  We sat there, staring at the floor, not thinking, not moving: just waiting. We had four hours, probably a little more before we could go into action.

  At half-past six we were still sitting there. The Scotch bottle was about half full. Cigarette butts mounted in the ashtrays. We were fit to walk up the wall.

  Then the telephone rang: a shrill sound that sounded sinister in the silent little apartment.